e last passage of a poem
written upon occasion of the feasts of the Annunciation and the
Resurrection falling on the same day.

Let faithful souls this double feast attend
In two processions. Let the first descend
The temple's stairs, and with a downcast eye
Upon the lowest pavement prostrate lie:
In creeping violets, white lilies, shine
Their humble thoughts and every pure design.
The other troop shall climb, with sacred heat,
The rich degrees of Solomon's bright seat: _steps_

In glowing roses fervent zeal they bear,
And in the azure flower-de-lis appear
Celestial contemplations, which aspire
Above the sky, up to the immortal choir.

William Drummond of Hawthornden, a Scotchman, born in 1585, may almost be
looked upon as the harbinger of a fresh outburst of word-music. No doubt
all the great poets have now and then broken forth in lyrical jubilation.
Ponderous Ben Jonson himself, when he takes to song, will sing in the joy
of the very sound; but great men have always so much graver work to do,
that they comparatively seldom indulge in this kind of melody. Drummond
excels in madrigals, or canzonets--baby-odes or songs--which have more of
wing and less of thought than sonnets. Through the greater part of his
verse we hear a certain muffled tone of the sweetest, like the music that
ever threatens to break out clear from the brook, from the pines, from
the rain-shower,--never does break out clear, but remains a suggested,
etherially vanishing tone. His is a _voix voilee_, or veiled voice of
song. It is true that in the time we are now approaching far more
attention was paid not merely to the smoothness but to the melody of
verse than any except the great masters had paid before; but some are at
the door, who, not being great masters, yet do their inferior part nearly
as well as they their higher, uttering a music of marvellous and
individual sweetness, which no mere musical care could secure, but which
springs essentially from music in the thought gathering to itself musical
words in melodious division, and thus fashioning for itself a fitting
body. The melody of their verse is all their own--as original as the
greatest art-forms of the masters. Of Drummond, then, here are two
sonnets on the Nativity; the first spoken by the angels, the second by
the shepherds.

_The Angels_.

Run, shepherds, run where Bethlehem blest appears.
We bring the best of news; be not dism